Five days after Selena's exile from Ashborne, she felt something wrong through the eternal flame—a disturbance in the patterns of the freed realm beyond the Hollow, a signature she recognized immediately even without their link. Dante's storm, but wrong. Fractured. Not the focused fury she had witnessed when he'd tried to kill the child-king, but something more fundamental breaking apart.
He was in trouble.
Selena hesitated at the boundary between the realm of ash and the world they had freed, the black flames still flickering weakly around her hands, a reminder of what she had become. She had exiled herself specifically to avoid imposing her will on others, to prevent her power from catalyzing more violence. Going to find Dante, intervening in whatever crisis he faced, would be exactly the kind of action she had sworn to stop taking.
